Monday, July 7, 2014

Destroying the Angel in the House

I was searching old computer files for a copy of a novel I wrote in the 1990's on the Ludlow Massacre. Old? Downright floppy disk-ancient! I haven't found that manuscript, but I did find this letter Virginia Woolf wrote in 1931, as she prepared to address a group of women who sought to enter professions barred to them. Her words are as powerful then as now. Perhaps more so, for Woolf's "angel in the house" still exists. In our heads, in the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court. There is no hierarchy of freedoms. Christina

Her words:

While I
was writing this review I discovered that if I were going to review

books I
should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom

was a
woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the

heroine
of the famous poem, "The Angel in the House." It was she who used

to come
between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who

bothered
me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed

her.

You who
come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her-

--you
may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe

her as
shortly as I can. She was intensely
sympathetic. She was immensely

charming...she
sacrificed herself daily...she never had a mind or wish of

her
own.

In
those days, the last of Queen Victoria---every house had its Angel. And

when I
came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The

shadow
of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in

the
room. Directly, that is to say, I took
my pen in my hand to review

that
novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered, "My dear,

you are
a young woman. You are writing about a
book that has been written

by a
man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter;
deceive; use all the arts

and
wiles of our sex. Never let anybody
guess that you have a mind of your

own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen.

I
turned on her and caught her by the throat.
I did my best to kill

her. My excuse, if I were to be had up on a court
of law, would be that I

acted
in self-defense. Had I not killed her
she would have killed me. She

would
have plucked the heart out of my writing...Thus, whenever I felt the

shadow
of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the

inkpot
and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of

great
assistance to her. IT IS FAR HARDER TO
KILL A PHANTOM THAN A

REALITY. She was always creeping back when I thought I
had dispatched her.

Though
I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was

severe;
it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning